Angela ThenFrom THE HOPE AND ANCHOR by Julia KiteCopyright 2014-2015

“Where are you from?”

The truth was London and the truth
was too complicated for most people. Nobody in London actually came from
London, or at least none of a certain kind of person, the kind of people Angela
was supposed to play nice and make friends with nowadays. When she wanted to
sound posh, she said Notting Hill. When she wanted to sound hard, she said
Shepherd’s Bush. When she felt like telling the truth, she said it was round
about North Kensington around Ladbroke Grove, sort of, W10, y’know what I mean?

The truth was tricky, it was sticky,
it was treacle. She didn’t have time to explain the intricacies of West London
human geography to everybody who asked, and quite frankly, nobody who asked
really wanted to know. They wanted the one- or two-word answer, so that’s what
Angela gave them. She was quite skilled with customer service. Her boss at the
Porchester Centre even said so; nobody ever complained. She gave them exactly
what they wanted, when they wanted it. Notting Hill. Shepherd’s Bush. North
Ken. On the topiramate she’d become so dozy that sometimes she forgot within
minutes which answer she’d just given. Notting Hill, Shepherd’s Bush, North
Ken. Alright? Yeah, alright, that’s wicked, OK.

It wasn’t OK, and it hadn’t been for
a long time. If there is a continuum of human happiness on which OK is dead
centre, things have been bouncing about in the space below that point for
years, to the extent where OK now looks pretty damn wonderful. Angela Archer
was age 9 when she had her first fit, 12 when her mother died, 14 when three
boys from her neighbourhood took her behind the railway depot near Little
Wormwood Scrubs and took turns teaching her not to be such a frigid bitch, 16
when what remained of her family moved from Ladbroke Grove down the road to
Shepherd’s Bush and she finally realised it was not the trauma that has put her
off boys but rather the recognition of a more permanent preference. Angela
Archer has been recalibrated.

At this specific point in time, a
time long before Neely Sharpe comes home to an empty flat, it has been only a
year – her seventeenth on this planet – since she made that realisation. And
for the year since she had that realisation, Angela has been taking her bicycle
deeper and deeper into West London during her free hours. I haven’t understood myself and I’ve been living in this head for 17
years, she thinks. Imagine how much I
don’t understand about this city. She waits for flashes of brilliance to
pop into her head every time she goes winding along the Grand Union Canal
towpath, the one that starts at Paddington and takes her all the way through to
Greenford, Greenford where she’d never set foot a day in her life despite being
born and raised in West London, before it becomes impassable. She has been
waiting quite some time.

There is a curve early on the route, one
where the towpath hugs the Westway and flirts a bit before shifting away from
Westbourne Park. Angela has watched the graffiti on the concrete walls under
this part of the motorway morph for months, but has never laid eyes on the
people responsible. They don’t want to be seen. Obvious reasons. But still,
it’s a bit noble of them, Angela thinks. Yeah, they tag their work and all, but
nobody actually sees them. It ain’t
like being on television and showing off for cameras and having everybody stare
at you and want to shag you. These people are what they make. No back-story. No
explanation. They do their thing and then they disappear and it is what it is.
Maybe they know something the people on Big
Brother don’t when it comes to making your name. Well, everybody knows
something the people on Big Brother
don’t. They’re a load of thick shits.

Impulsively, she grimaces as she speeds by
the Ladbroke Grove Sainsbury’s. Angela spends more time at this Sainsbury’s
than she likes; it’s a weekend job on the tills. She’d been in hospital that
day so many Octobers ago when, just on the other side of the supermarket,
fireballs tore through the morning and the Sainsbury’s car park filled with the
dead, dying, and miraculously spared. “There’s been a rail crash at Ladbroke
Grove,” she remembers her mum telling her, the gentle voice coming to her as
she lay among impossibly fluffy pillows in an impossibly uncool hospital gown.
“Two trains hit each other and then caught fire.” It was the simplest, most gentle
way to explain to a child, bewildered by her own brain, what had happened to
her neighbourhood on one of the few occasions she wasn’t in it. The stench of
diesel fuel and all it had burnt lingered over the Archer’s corner of West
London for days, and her mother quit going to that Sainsbury’s altogether,
driving two miles to another one to avoid any reminders. “Turn it off,” she
barked whenever the crash came up on television news. “I’ve had enough. We know
enough. It’s nothing to do with us.” Mr Archer would always protest feebly
before conceding every time.

Like most things prohibited by parents,
the disaster’s allure only increased in Angela’s imagination. Something
terrible had happened where she lived, and she’d missed it. All of it. She was
still missing it. Her mother wouldn’t even let her go hang out with Jenny
Fernandes, because she lived in Kensal House, a crap modernist monstrosity of a
block that offered a perfect view of the railway from Jenny’s bedroom. Deprived
of first-hand knowledge, Angela had had to obtain what she could, where she
could.

“They haven’t gotten all the bodies out,
y’know,” her big sister, in the middle of a half-hearted teenage goth phase and
resentful at having to baby-sit, told her a few nights later. “Some of them got
trapped when the carriages got all torn up. They can’t get to them until the
big cranes come out and lift up everything. It could be a week that they’re
just lying there dead. Not joking.” Nightmares inevitably ensued. When Angela
finally confessed to her mother why she kept waking up screaming, her sister
got a smack in the face with Mrs Archer’s sovereign-clad hand. In retrospect,
Angela felt guilty about the punishment. Poor Andy hadn’t told any lies. It
wasn’t a crime to not make the truth palatable.

But enough of the past. Or at least that
part of it. Strange to recall one incident, the sudden compression of deaths
into one date and time, when right across the canal from that Sainsbury’s is a
veritable city of the notable dead. Isambard Kingdom Brunel is buried here in
Kensal Green Cemetery, the engineer entombed within spitting distance of the
railway he built. The storytellers: Trollope and Thackeray. A famous tightrope
walker called Blondin, who has a little orchard named after him somewhere in Ealing,
one Angela will never know exists because Ealing, the next borough over from
the one where her father has just bought a house riddled with dry rot but free
from history, may as well be on the moon. Somebody told her Freddie Mercury out
of Queen was cremated there, but she’s not too sure. Have to check that one.
Some people are full of shit. Angela doesn’t know who G. K. Chesterton is, he’s
not on the school syllabus, but it is safe to assume she would have looked upon
his lines referencing this place with a nod of the head, a tacit acceptance: For there is good news yet to hear and fine
things to be seen; Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green. And
then she would have laughed long and hard at the idea of Kensal Green as a
celestial motorway service station. Be sure to scan your Nectar Card at
Sainsbury’s and start collecting karma points today. The Afterlife is
accessible via the northern edge of the car park during normal trading hours.
Closed Sundays.

The next leg of the route is Angela’s
favourite, though she fears it would be dull to admit it. For the
mile-and-a-bit from Scrubs Lane to Stonebridge Park, she pedals through a place
that is somewhere between the city and the country, the present and the past.
Here, industrial estates hug both sides of the canal, relics from when the
boats on the water were meant for something other than leisure. Nowadays, Park
Royal is home to those businesses where Angela suspects the overwhelmingly
average are in charge. Used cars. Small scale import-export. Lots of food. An
industrial recycler screams its name in block letters across the top of its
warehouse, P O W E R D A Y, as if passing traffic like Angela might be tempted
to stop in for a quick browse. Amidst all the hard, thankless, decidedly
unglamorous slog, nature has been re-installed: elm and lime and London plane,
great big weeping willows, all shade the cyclists. Angela listens to the hum
and creak of machinery, punctuated by the odd crack or crush, and knows that
the city is working. She doesn’t care about football, but there’s the Wembley
Arch in the distance, a signpost, marking space and her place in it. A nature
reserve, maintained by nobody in particular, juts off to one side, filling a
gap between the towpath and the railways that made the canal so obsolete. It’s
good for birds, this bit. Families of swans, the young ones starting as awkward
grey balls of fluff that grow up to armour their faces with the first moult,
paddle by, heading towards where Angela just left. Earlier this spring, caught
in a sudden storm, she waited out the rain underneath these brick bridges,
watching mist descend like history. And she’s seen homeless men washing their
clothes here, hanging them up on the brick walls to dry in whatever sun they
can get, and the memory of it causes her to suddenly become extremely fixated
on the path directly in front of her. The ground beneath her wheels feels flat
enough, but when the path emerges from the trees just before the old Harlesden
lock, she has risen; now, she rides two storeys above the North Circular Road.
Of course she thinks she has risen. It is incomprehensible to imagine something
as massive as the North Circular lowering itself for the likes of her.

Past Stonebridge Park, slabs of council
estates soon to be cleared – regenerated
– this is Metroland. Angela rings her bike bell frenetically as she rounds a
ninety-degree curve on the narrowing path, stray twigs and vines whipping her
outside leg. Fewer factories and more bungalows and semi-detached houses. Even
another Sainsbury’s. On the opposite bank of the canal, two mutts play-fight in
the grass beside their owner’s narrowboat as the long-haired, shirtless man
tends a barbecue. Angela rings her bell again; he waves. He’s strange but he’s
safe for her, stuck on the opposite bank with no crossing nearby, and that’s
why Angela likes him. He has moored his boat a sufficient distance from the
golf course so as to not attract attention. Nobody is playing today, and if she
wasn’t watching the path in front of her in preparation for another curve,
Angela would see the flags on the pins lazily flapping in a slight summer
breeze. And then the strangest thing: the landscape ripples. Across the canal,
hills rise out of Horsenden Park. This looks like a proper bit of countryside,
not the token nod to greenery found in most of the city parks Angela knows. She
sees an exit from the towpath, and takes it. Ignores the older couple
strolling, ignores another happy couple with kids. Ignores the grass and then
the pavement and zips onto the street as if nobody else would ever need it.
Right now, they don’t.

She lifts her feet off the pedals and
sticks her legs out straight in front of her, one on each side of the blur of a
front wheel as she picks up speed going ever-so-slightly downhill on Greenford
Road. Wheeeee, she calls out despite
herself. There’s nobody on the street to hear her. This far out is where cars
are the rule, not the exception or the foolish purchase of a boy racer who then
curses the hours wasted trying to find a place to park the fucking thing.
Angela will never drive a car (not allowed; imagine having a fit behind the
wheel and taking out a dozen other drivers when all you wanted was a quick trip
to the shops) and quite frankly she has no business on a bike (similar reasons,
but potential carnage most likely limited to only herself and the emotional
health of anybody witnessing the sight), but it doesn’t stop her loving the
thrill of acceleration however she can get it. Fuckingwheeeeeeeeeeee, she speeds past the retail park – all the usual
suspects; Next, Carphone Warehouse, Costa Coffee, all the names recognisable
whether you were brought up in Shepherd’s Bush or in Sandringham – and
underneath the railway bridge, where the Underground is no longer underground.
She’s going downhill fast, which Angela regards as preferable to nowhere fast
because at least the scenery changes. She passes Uneeda Drive and makes a
mental note to remember the most stupid street name she has ever seen in a
lifetime of noticing the names of places. Uneeda Drive, Uneeda Walk More Often
You Lazy Fuck, Uneeda Life, Uneeda Chicken Cottage or Something Out Here
Because I Can’t See Any Place People Just Go to Hang Out. It’s all houses down
Greenford Road. All semis with brownish and reddish roofs, all a variation on
the same Middlesexual theme. This is where they write Middlesex on their post
even though Middlesex doesn’t even exist anymore, Angela remembers. Christ.
Wow. Wheeeeeeeeeeeee.

She reaches Western Avenue. She knows Western Avenue. The
A40. It’s what the Westway becomes once you’re, well, west. It starts on the
edge of Shepherd’s Bush, just past the White City Estate, and presumably goes
further west than anywhere she’s ever been before. Angela shifts from the road
to the pavement at the traffic light. Looks left, taps her heels against the
bicycle’s sturdy frame: There’s no place
like home. There’s no place like home. Follow the greyish shit road. But
instead she turns right. Northolt, a sign informs her, lies ahead. And Yeading,
and Ruislip. She’s never heard of Yeading. But Ruislip, West Ruislip, is the place the Central Line ends, the dead-end of
the Tube’s big fat red artery that bisects a map she knows so well. Her dad
drives the Circle Line, a closed system. When she was small he snuck her into
his cab and they orbited the heart of the city and he called out a fact at each
stop: This is Farringdon, see the cattle ramps left over from when Smithfield
Market sold things people actually needed. This is Moorgate, site of the worst
crash in the history of the Tube. This is Tower Hill, which used to be called
Mark Lane but that wasn’t much help to tourists, was it? Was it? Angela, pay attention. She doesn’t pay
attention too well and she doesn’t know how much of that is her fault and how
much can be blamed on the lamotrigine, on the carbamazepine, on whatever else
they’re trying on her this year. Attention must be rationed, so she has tried
to get to know the world around her to the best of her ability in hopes that,
should her attention be depleted altogether, small signals and familiar
signposts will be enough to carry her home.

Knowing she is still within grabbing distance of that long
red Central life-Line, the one that will safely deposit her a short walk from
home no matter how long it takes, she leans forward and pedals harder. She
takes a moment to inspect the Polish War Memorial, sitting on its own island
smack-bang in the middle of the road. Big fuck-off bronze eagle up top. Angela scans the
names, looking for one she has a chance of pronouncing correctly, and there it
is, in between Miklaszewski and Minkiewicz: SERGEANT J J MINGE. Angela laughs,
then feels guilty even though there is nobody nearby to hear. Then onward she goes,
climbing northwest. Then the A40 curves but the pavement stays straight, and
Angela finds herself deposited onto another suburban street. Across waste
ground and back gardens, she can see rows upon rows of semi-detached, all in
the Middlesex style, some with sheds, some with children’s toys, some with
laundry lazily waving from lines and racks. Who
lives in a place like this? she thinks, and at that moment, Angela Archer
decides to get lost.

She turns when she wants. Here, a shopping parade of
mock-Tudor two-storey buildings, the structures nicer than the ones she knows
but holding the same crap newsagents, the same Post Office, the chippy that
does a little Chinese, the off-license. But the skies look brighter here. The
roads are wider. Or maybe they just have fewer irate motorists honking and
parking two-deep and spouting off threats. She turns, and turns, and turns
again. The frequency of green slits between buildings increases, then decreases
again as houses compress back into terraces. Where are all the people? she wonders. A postman, a middle-ager
walking his dog. Some sort of terrier she can’t name. Not a Staffordshire like
the ones on her street. And everywhere, sky. She’s not wearing a watch, but
even if she was, she would not have bothered checking how much time she wastes
threading through the streets of Hillingdon, of Hayes and Northolt and Yeading,
switching her legs to auto-pilot whilst wide eyes take in every suburban
detail. The kind of details people living here stopped noticing ages ago are
what imprint onto Angela’s mind: benches outside shops, a distinct lack of dog
shit and graffiti, and that the trees planted along pavements here are not the
trees planted in Shepherd’s Bush. These trees are thick-trunked and aspirational,
erect, daring the heavens to rain down on them. And they don’t, of course they
don’t. Fucking hell. How many places like
this have I never, ever been?

She rides blind: no maps, no compass, no knowledge of what
goes where. Yet the invisible tether hooked onto her clunky thirdhand Raleigh
pulls her back to Western Avenue. She’s not ready to go home. It’s going to be
a long ride back there. Her temporary salvation comes just a few hundred metres
away: a park unlike any of the others she’s discovered today. In fact, she’s
never seen a park like this anywhere, not even in books illustrated or
otherwise. Four perfect grassy half-domes, increasing in size, rise up beside
the road. They could be the burial mounds of her prehistoric ancestors on this
island. A family, from biggest to smallest. Or maybe a Druid tribute to tits.
She rubs her eyes and blinks hard but the four hills still sit beside the road,
and she knows precisely why they send that tiny bit of fear shooting up from
her feet: They’re too perfect.

She speeds into the grass and circles
lazily, sizing up what lies in front of her. She drops the bike and approaches
the highest of the hills. Angela doesn’t have to look around her to see if
there is somebody who could steal; there is nobody nearby except for the stream
of drivers, and they aren’t going to veer off the motorway to snatch that piece
of crap. Though her legs feel like jelly and her arse is nearly numb from the
bike saddle, she feels seized by a need to climb, because today she is Angela
the Conqueror, she is somebody who found a new land and explored it and would
have planted a flag if she’d had one, and there was morning, and there was
mid-afternoon, and it was good.

Angela sees the flies before she sees the
fox. Two greenbottles, cavorting in mid-air. Maybe an intentional dance, or
maybe pure utility. The sun catches their iridescence, and that’s what catches
Angela’s eye. Angela doesn’t know a thing about insects and she doesn’t want to
know. They land almost simultaneously upon the red-brown fur lying atop the
summit of this impossibly symmetric mound of earth. The animal’s face is not
frozen in the peaceful sleep recognisable as death’s sibling. Rather, she died
with a grimace, with canine teeth protruding from a black rim of lip. Angela
freezes but the flies still move. She was a she, and a mother at that: lying on
her side, her two rows of teats are now utterly useless, a complete waste, no
good to anyone or anything that may come across them. A breeze, one Angela
didn’t notice pushing or pulling her bicycle as she circled the streets below,
catches the fox’s fur, and ripples it gently. Only Angela’s eyes shoot into
motion: she looks for a wound, a gash, a bullet, any explanation. There has to
be one. That’s how life, and in turn death, work: there is always a reason you
can figure out if you’re clever enough. And when she finds nothing, she thinks
that’s her fault.

And now she is running, running faster
than she ever has done in her life even though there is nobody chasing after
her. Halfway down the hill, she trips and shrieks and it is the first sound out
of her mouth in hours; a smear of mud, darker than she expected and with garish
green blades of grass embedded in the centre, stains her tracksuit bottoms.
She’s on her bike within seconds and speeding away from the green and onto the
grey pavement. Her wheels leave black skids on it as she points her bike east.
Clinging to Western Avenue, and only stopping to avoid the inevitability of
being flattened at the Hangar Lane Gyratory had she not, she barrels down
toward London, London proper, London and all she’s ever known. Once home, she
throws her bicycle down onto the paved-over bit of front garden, narrowly
missing the car that she can’t drive and never will, and she’s inside before
the rear wheel can stop its lazy mid-air spin.

“Angela? That you?” she hears her
father call from the lounge, but she doesn’t reply, and he is used to this. He
knows it is his younger daughter because seconds after his unanswered inquiry,
a bedroom door slams and two shoes thunk against the floor. Angela lies in her
bed and stares at the ceiling, but she does not cry. She catches her breath.
And she fails spectacularly at trying not to think.

Everybody said her mother was so
young. Too young, and not that old by today’s standards. At 17, Angela’s
mid-twenties feel like eons away. She has the gift of still being so young that
she doesn’t appreciate how blissfully, foolishly young she really is. She hasn’t
thought much about it, but she assumes that by 24, she will be gone from West
London altogether. At the closest – the absolute very closest – she’ll consider
Camden Town. Get a bunch of friends and rent a flat together and really live it
up. They’ll have jobs that pay enough for that, somehow. Or East London.
Hackney is where everybody with anything interesting in their head goes now.
Whatever. But probably, maybe, most likely not West London. Her best mate just
moved to Wood Green with her family. A straightforward trip on two Tube lines,
it’s only zone 3, but she might as well have emigrated. She actually got out.
She took that step, she’s on her way to living before she dies. Angela works at
Sainsbury’s and doesn’t even know how to look up the scan code for instructions
how to do likewise.

When Angela is done failing
spectacularly at trying not to think, she rolls over and stares out her window
at the street below. It’s quieter here than Ladbroke Grove was and there’s
nothing to catch her eye, so she shifts focus to the windowsill. Clock radio,
lipstick (Lilac Lustre, three pounds ninety-nine from Superdrug), more lipstick
(an obscene pink called Girl About Town, packaged in a little bullet that
reminded her of a matte black tampon, stolen from House of Fraser), tissues
both used and clean, pens both dry and full, and the blank book. It’s a chunky
brick of a journal, odd for an impulse purchase. Why did I buy that? Angela
thinks. I can’t remember. I’m not that good at drawing and I don’t need to drop
twelve quid on fancy crap like that. Twelve quid is the money I saved not
paying for that lipstick and instead I went and pissed it away on some posh
paper. Oh, but the cover’s lovely, it is, all thin vertical stripes in every
colour. It’s fun, it is. Fun but not childish. It looks like what I’d want to
carry places where people would see it. I could write in it on the bus or the
Tube, if I wrote. I could write. I can draw. That’s it. I’ll write, I’ll draw.

The third pen she tries actually has
ink in it. Baffled at how to begin, she starts with what she knows: ANGELA
MARIE ARCHER she prints in block capitals on the first page. Can’t argue with
that. So far, no foul. Underneath those letters: the date. Underneath those
numbers: she doesn’t know, so she begins to sketch a cycling silhouette. On the
next page, she tries to capture in light biro strokes the face of the fox, the
fallen animal, the vanquished queen lying alone atop her hill. But it’s not
quite right. It’s flat, it’s not right at all. Angela tries another approach: I took my bike way out west and oh my days everything
was absolutely ridiculous, she writes, then crosses out her words with one
black gouge. Silly. Worse than silly – stupid. What’s the word? Trite. That’s
it, trite. And boring. I’m boring. I’ll come back to it, Angela says. I’ll fix
it, I’ll keep at it. I’ll do more later. I have to do more later because there's a lot of ground to cover, a lot of London I have to figure out. And no guarantee I've got plenty of time to do it.

Seven years later, Angela Archer
does not live in Camden Town or Hackney or anywhere walking distance of the
two. She lives a stone’s throw from her old North Ken home, on a main road
where her mother barely ever took her shopping as a kid because it didn’t have
what they wanted and only some of what they needed. She remembers, when she was
little, what her mother always said when on one of her rants about the state of
where they lived and what ought to be done about it and what they ought to do
for themselves because nobody in this damn world was going to do it for them:
Harrow Road makes you feel poor and foreign.

But her mother is long gone and
Angela has grown tall. And she stays in West London long after her sister and
brother have shot off, and she finds a flat on the Harrow Road and she finds a
short girl from Stevenage with a job so boring Angela sometimes forgets what it
is. They do every pub quiz within a stone’s throw of that little flat, and come
top three in each and every one, because there’s something about this short
girl from Stevenage, a lot of brain hidden under the painfully tight ponytail
that shows off those high cheekbones, that highlights that face which has
something of a history about it. Angela doesn’t feel like the strange one, the
exotic one, when she’s around Neely Sharpe, though she’ll never admit it,
because she knows that in Neely’s eyes – those nearly-black eyes, eyes that she
knows how to use to melt Angela every fucking time – she’s the most interesting person
in the world by dint of her postcode alone, and that’s a tough act to maintain.
But Angela will try. Angela A-for-Effort Archer. She may not be clever and she
may not be revealing the secrets of life and death through either painstaking
method or blessed serendipity but nobody will ever say she doesn’t try.

This is the greatest place in the world,
she tells Neely, as they walk arm-in-arm on the canal towpath at Little Venice
on an early autumn weekend afternoon before the desperate cold blows in. Neely
wanted a coffee from the little café barge, and so they got one each and made
them last half an hour as they tossed biscuit crumbs at the birds. They could
have stopped into one of the canalside pubs and avoided the chill that nipped
at their fingers when they set down their warm drinks, but they’d already had
their fill: at the Hope and Anchor on Harrow Road, where Angela had a shandy
and Neely her pint of Newcastle Brown, and a packet of salt and vinegar between
them. Angela had smiled at tiny Neely coming back to the table from the bar, a
pint in each hand dwarfing her bony fingers, crisps clamped between her teeth.
And Neely had smiled back, making the crisp packet crinkle. And Angela had
laughed, and so had Neely, and the junkie couple sitting in the corner waiting
to do their deal had wanted to know just what was so funny, what the fuck was so
very funny?

After the coffee, they set off on foot
along Angela’s old route: west. Along the motoroway, the graffiti still
screamed all bloody and neon among the grey. There was a bit of fluff,
provenance unknown, stuck in the shorter girl’s high black ponytail. Angela
granted it reprieve. For now, it could stay. The two women passed underneath a
footbridge, walking just slightly faster than a swan and a small flock of
mallards. Laughter rose from the little restaurant on the opposite bank and
joined the thin smoke from its fireplace chimney. Late lunchtime wine and
conversation were flowing between the good-looking, well-off new locals who
can’t and don’t believe Angela when they ask her where she’s from and she
replies London without the slightest
hesitation.